The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey Read Free Book Online Page A

well—for example, China at 1.55, Cuba at 1.46, Iran at 1.85, and Russia at 1.61.
    In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.
    Thailand’s experience over the past thirty years exemplifies this process. During that time, female literacy rose to 90 percent; 50 percent of the workforce is now female; and fertility fell from 6 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.5 today. Although Thailand is classified as only moderately free on the economic freedom index, its gross domestic product (GDP) grew in terms of purchasing power parity from just over $1,000 per capita in 1960 to over $8,500 per capita in 2012.
    Back in 1968, Garrett Hardin declared, “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero.” That’s no longer true. Japan is now experiencing a fall in its population due largely to reduced fertility, as are Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland, and some 20 other countries and territories. And as we have seen, the global total fertility rate is rapidly decelerating. Of the 231 countries and territories listed in the 2013 CIA World Factbook, 122 are at or below replacement fertility rates.
    Norton persuasively argues that Hardin’s fears of a population tragedy of the commons are actually realized when the invisible hand of economic freedom is shackled. Many poor countries have weakly specified and enforced property rights. Poor property rights means that many resources are effectively left in open-access commons where the incentive is to grab what one can before another individual gets it. Norton points out that in such situations, more children mean more hands for grabbing unowned and unprotected resources such as water, fodder, timber, fish, and pastures, and for the clearing of land. Lacking the institutional incentives to invest in and preserve resources, this drive to take as much as possible as quickly as possible leads to perpetual poverty.
    And what about in the past? Haven’t societies collapsed due to overpopulation? To the extent it is true that some societies have suffered collapses, we now know that it was because they lacked the proper social, political, and economic institutions for channeling individual striving into a process of economic growth that ultimately promotes the accumulation of human capital and lower fertility. Very few, if any, earlier societies could be characterized as either economically free or respectful of the rule of law. Throughout history, most people lived in the institutional equivalents of open-access commons overseen by rapacious elites who encouraged high fertility rates and the plundering of natural resources. It turns out that economic freedom and the rule of law are the equivalent of enclosing the open-access breeding commons, causing parents to bear more and more of the costs of rearing children. In other words, economic freedom actually serves as an invisible hand of population control.

    Hope for Africa?
    The United Nations’ 2012 Revision forecasts that more than half of global population growth between now and 2050 will take place in Africa, rising from 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion. The middle-variant trend for sub-Saharan Africa projects that total fertility rate will fall from 4.9 children now to 3.1 by 2050, reaching 2.1 by 2100. As noted above, a more worrying study published in an October 2014 issue of the journal Science suggested that by 2100 Africa’s population would grow even faster, rising from 1.1 billion to between 3.1 and 5.7 billion, with a median projection of 4.2 billion.
    But is it plausible that much of Africa and many of the other least developed countries will remain